by Jon Land
Both teams had finished just before dawn. They had ditched their trucks, equipment, and uniforms and rendezvoused here in the lair Marbles had found to serve as their command center. Jack Tyrell had doughnuts waiting for them, purchased for half price since they had been left over from the previous day. For his part, Marbles hadn’t stopped working yet, even now stringing coaxial cable from the dozen television monitors into the computer console. He wore a tool belt as comfortably as a gunfighter’s holster, its contents equally deadly.
Of the other two dozen men in the command center, half had specific tasks to keep them busy through the day. The remaining twelve kept their distance from the machines but stayed close to the weapons, on the outside chance they would be needed. Since he was planning for the long term, Tyrell had put together as large a contingent as possible. Men who would follow him to the next target when this was over and done. None of them could be classified as young in terms of age, but the way Tyrell looked at it, the last twenty-five years hadn’t been any better for them than for him. They were fugitives from the underground and ex-cons who had never made it that far. Men who had lived the best of their lives with him once before and looked forward to doing so again.
Vance still looked fidgety, so Tyrell slapped him on the shoulder and steered him toward the wall of television monitors Marbles had up and running.
“Come on, Othell, let’s watch a little TV,” he said, a sophisticated remote control in hand. “Maybe find a soap or one of those daytime talk shows, today’s topic ‘Lesbian Daughters of Women Suing Fertility Clinics.’”
Tyrell pushed a button, and one of the sets lit up with a picture of the George Washington Bridge.
“Now what have we here … ?”
He touched another button on the remote, and a second screen burst alive, with the scene inside the Lincoln Tunnel, traffic crawling along at the usual clip, the screen not much more than a blur of headlights and taillights.
Jackie Terror held the remote like a baton, conducting his return to the life he belonged in. He felt elated, alive again. He clicked the remote, and a shot of the Brooklyn Bridge filled screen number three.
Click, and a traffic jam inside the Holland Tunnel came alive on a fourth screen. Then the Manhattan Bridge, the Queens Midtown Tunnel, the Queensboro Bridge, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, the Triborough Bridge … His heart was hammering against his chest so hard he was beginning to wonder seriously if he could wait until nine o’clock.
Suddenly Marbles waved to get his attention, other hand pressed against his transistorized headset.
“The tanker’s in place,” he reported.
Tyrell turned his attention to the red LED readout on a wall-mounted clock:
8:45
FORTY-NINE
“I hate fucking traffic,” Sal Belamo moaned as the car inched its way across the upper deck of the George Washington Bridge. He looked over at Blaine in the passenger seat.”I told you we should have taken the Lincoln Tunnel.”
“And then you told me you hated driving through the damn things.”
“All that water … You ever think about that?”
“No.”
Sal shrugged. Moving Buck Torrey in his condition from the hospital the night before had been deemed impossible, so he had arranged the next-best thing: a half-dozen fully armed Special Forces veterans guarding Buck at all times. Sal and Liz had waited until the first group arrived before leaving to rendezvous with Blaine and Johnny.
The news when they were finally all together wasn’t good. Hank Belgrade, along with Will Thatch, had utterly vanished, and with Hank went any chance of dealing with this crisis through normal channels. The only man Blaine could reach who stood a chance of helping them was the FBI assistant director in charge of counterterrorism, Sam Kirkland, who had been point man at the Washington Monument seven months before.
“This better be good,” Kirkland had greeted groggily just after midnight.
“What would you say to a city about to be under siege?” Blaine queried over the phone.
“I’d say keep talking.”
Kirkland listened without comment, the scratching sound Blaine heard on the other end of the line indicative of his listener’s taking copious notes. But everything went silent when he mentioned the name Jack Tyrell.
“He was the one at the Monument,” Blaine said. “In disguise, but it was Tyrell who got away.” When Kirkland didn’t respond, McCracken continued, “You fall back asleep on me, Mr. Director?”
“I only wish. Then I could be dreaming.”
“Sounds like Jack Tyrell’s no stranger to you, either.”
“Hardly. We’ve met before.” Kirkland took a deep breath. “I was the undercover FBI agent who infiltrated Midnight Run twenty-five years ago.”
“Wait until you hear what he’s been up to since … .”
“Where are you?” Kirkland had asked when Blaine was finished.
“It’s better if you don’t know. For obvious reasons.”
“I’m the goddamn FBI!”
“If Black Flag can get to Hank Belgrade, they can get to anyone.”
“Jesus Christ, what a mess …”
“I’ll give you a cell phone number where you can reach me as soon as you’ve got something.”
“Be patient. This is gonna take me some time to check out.”
“If Tyrell’s already in New York with the Devil’s Brew, there might not be much time left.”
“We can’t close off the city.”
“Why not?”
“Be serious. Look, I’ve got a nine A.M. meeting at New York headquarters tomorrow. I’ll spend the rest of the night on the phone, if that’s what it takes to get some answers.”
Obviously, though, the rest of the night had not been enough; it was just past eight forty-five in the morning now, Kirkland still hadn’t called back, and all of Blaine’s subsequent attempts to reach him had failed. He was beginning to fear that Kirkland had gone the way of Hank Belgrade and was immensely relieved when the cell phone rang.
Blaine snatched up the phone, as Sal continued to edge the car through heavy traffic across the George Washington Bridge. “It’s about time.”
“Everything you gave me is a dead end,” Kirkland started.
“I warned you.”
“First of all, nobody my meager level of clearance could reach ever heard of this Devil’s Brew, from the Pentagon to Brookhaven itself.”
“The man running the project wanted it that way.”
“To keep it from falling into the wrong hands.”
“Yes.”
“And then he decided to dump the whole supply and erase all evidence it ever existed.”
“That’s right, which brings us to your old friend Jack Tyrell.”
“Same story, unfortunately. I can’t find any record of this Black Flag project or of Tyrell spending a stretch of years in forced service to his country.”
“Black Flag didn’t leave records, Kirkland; that was the point.”
“It’s tough to sell government officials on conspiracies and shadow cadres before they’ve had their morning coffee. You’ve got to give me something more concrete.”
“What about Tyrell’s son? Like I told you last night, all this is happening because he was killed a month ago. In New York City.”
“The problem is the man who was killed at that elementary school has since been identified as Alejandro Ortiz, a Colombian national with a long list of drug busts. His mother died in Medellín two years ago. His father is a farmer who speaks no English.”
That news hit Blaine square in the gut. He thought he had everything about Jack Tyrell figured out, but obviously he didn’t. At the National Zoo the night before, the man from Black Flag had confirmed that they had lost control of Tyrell after his son’s death in the shootout. So what was he missing here?
“I hear traffic,” Kirkland said. “Where are you?”
“Middle of the GWB.”
“Couldn’t stay away
, could you?”
“You know me: I like to be where the action is.”
“Then why don’t you head toward headquarters here at Federal Plaza, so we can run this by the numbers?”
“I’ve never done too well working within the system.”
“Make an exception.”
Blaine accepted that there was no other choice open to them for now. “At the rate we’re moving, don’t expect us until lunch.”
Behind the wheel, Sal Belamo passed by a school bus just after reaching the center of the span, and Blaine saw the source of the traffic jam: a pair of bungee jumpers who had rigged their equipment into the bridge’s safety rail between the guy wires were involved in a heated exchange with a pair of cops who had just handcuffed them.
“You ask me,” said Sal, “cops should just throw them off without their cords for holding up the traffic.”
FIFTY
As nine o’clock drew closer, Jack Tyrell could feel his heart thudding harder against his chest. He was about to do something no man had ever done before, yet suddenly he felt a profound sense of sadness, the pain of loss never more real for him. Mary deserved to be by his side now. They should be doing this together, their son still safe and alive.
But he was dead, and now so was Mary, and with them had gone what little hope Tyrell held out for the world. He found the irony striking. Working for Black Flag had been the only way he could guarantee the boy a safe and healthy existence. Cooperate or your boy dies. So Tyrell had cooperated, and his boy had died anyway.
Tyrell closed his eyes, as he always did when sadness started to get the better of him, closed his eyes and lost himself in what gave his life its purpose:
The moment the bomb went off.
He never felt more alive than when death was at hand. Each time, his mouth went bone dry with anticipation. Flinching in the last moment before detonation, and then viewing the single flash followed by the roaring fireball that swallowed one world and coughed another back up. In that blessed moment life found meaning, a sensory feast.
From the blinding glow, to the ringing that left his ears fuzzy and hollow, to the high-pitched screams of the wounded and dying, to the wondrous stench of flesh burning amidst the acrid scent of scorched metal … the air cracking and popping, stubborn embers blown outward … pieces of the blast spewed into the air and falling back to the earth as unrecognizable husks …
Tyrell saw it all when he closed his eyes, opened them again to the smell of skin fried black and the sight of charred eyeballs that looked like marshmallows dropped off the stick.
He brought his transmitter up to eye level, studying the black button within easy reach of his thumb. Thought of Mary and the son he had watched from afar. He always imagined himself walking up one day and taking a close look at him, wondered if the kid would look back and know. That moment would never come now, and sadly, the closest he ever came to his son was at his funeral a month before.
The wall clock ticked to 9:00.
Jackie Terror held his breath and pushed the button.
FIFTY-ONE
On the George Washington Bridge, Sal Belamo’s rental car had just crawled past a tow truck hauling an old Lincoln, even with the bungee jumpers when Blaine heard what sounded like a massive thunderclap—not just heard but felt, deep in the pit of his stomach. There was a flash in the rearview mirror that made him squint in the final moment before the world was yanked out from beneath the car.
He felt it being lifted off the bridge and spun violently around. His first thought was that there had been some awful chain collision that sent a hundred cars plowing into each other. But flaming vehicles were actually hurtling past him through the air, to be deposited back on the bridge in ragged clumps of charred, smoldering steel. His own car bounced one way, then the other, and ended up with its front tires shakily riding the bed of a four-by-four.
Shock wave …
The words sticking in Blaine’s mind, he grabbed for the breath that had been sucked out as a burst of superheated air washed over him.
Jack Tyrell felt as though he were tripping on acid. All the times he had dropped the stuff and lived out the fantasy of the world rupturing at its core, blowing apart from the inside out. He and the other soldiers of Midnight Run alone left to witness people peeled back to the bone. Close his eyes and he could see it happen, make believe it was real.
But this time it was indeed real. The command center, though safely isolated, rumbled like a house set against an airport runway when a jet takes off. Tyrell quivered as the television screens brought his wondrous work to life.
His viewing started with the most dramatic sight of all, at the George Washington Bridge, where the force of the blast from dual spans had created a flaming vortex of air, spinning and hurling vehicles in all directions. Some crashed against each other in a domino effect, while others ended up atop one another. Still more dropped through the huge chasms in the bridge into the charcoal-broiled air, turning on their noses and rolling over before smashing into the waters below.
On the upper deck, a school bus was sent whirling like a propeller along the bridge, smashing cars from its path until it slammed into a toppled tractor-trailer. Impact sent the bus careening toward the safety rail, where it mounted a number of mashed, burning car husks and smashed through the guy wires, turning them into steel-like tentacles whipped wildly about. The bus teetered on the edge with its nose ever so close to turning downward. Flames licked at its tail before receding as if the blast had sucked them back in.
Goddamn blast was powerful enough to blow itself out, thought Jackie Terror, sweeping his eyes across the remainder of the screens. Goddamn …
The center of the Lincoln Tunnel had collapsed in a firestorm of rubble and twisted steel. Numerous secondary explosions snapped off, hurling asphalt in all directions. The smoking, crackling tunnel center looked like a barricade formed of stacked car skeletons and assorted debris.
At the Queensboro Bridge, the explosion had first blown a chasm even bigger than either of those in the GWB and then collapsed a huge portion of the center of the span onto Roosevelt Island below. Cars and trucks showered down after it, twisting against each other in the blast-baked air before landing in a mesh of ruined metal and death.
The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, meanwhile, did not fare nearly as well as the Holland or Lincoln. The explosion ruptured the seams layered along both its sides, exposing the walls to incredible pressure from the East River. In almost no time at all, those sides had given way to an avalanche of water as the river poured in, dousing the flames at an incredible cost.
The Williamsburg Bridge provided the biggest delight for Tyrell’s eye. A smoother flow of traffic allowed the blast to catch a number of vehicles in motion, projecting them into the air, where they actually seemed to be flying. The illusion held only until they plopped back down through the flames, either atop other vehicles, still holding to the bridge, or joining the cars that had toppled through the chasm to the waters below.
What Tyrell couldn’t see but pictured clearly all the same was the quartet of huge electric transformers responsible for powering Manhattan’s subways, Grand Central and Penn stations exploding in a shower of sparks to more conventional explosives. Over the next few moments every train in the city came to a halt, thousands and thousands of commuters forced to hike their way fearfully out of the tunnels through the darkness.
It was all there on the screens before him, fresh shots already being captured from a greater distance by his spotter helicopter. Smoke rose in billows around the entire island of Manhattan. Tyrell invented the smells and sounds, closed his eyes and breathed deeply, letting his imagination paint the picture for him. He was an artist, and this was his mural, his landscape, the shape of his vision come to pass in one blood-soaked moment that had cut New York City off from the rest of the world.
Jack Tyrell ran his eyes over the screens again, holding on the George Washington Bridge where the blackened school bus was still teeterin
g on the safety rail, a stiff wind away from plunging to a watery death in the river below.
“Goddamn,” he said, out loud this time.
Don Imus, host of an immensely successful and nationally syndicated morning radio show originating in New York, reached for his studio phone.
“I’m calling him myself.”
“He’s in a meeting,” his producer said again. “Something came up.”
“The White House. Good morning,” a voice greeted.
“Don Imus for Bubba.”
“Excuse me?”
“The I-Man, lady, calling from the Big Apple, where Bubba’s booked for a segment this morning. We’re talking again. Now put down your doughnut, hustle your butt to his office, and tell him to pick up.”
Before the receptionist could respond further, a technician knocked on the studio’s glass and then barged through the door.
“Line three,” he announced breathlessly. “Take the call.”
Imus put the White House on hold and pressed the new line. “Is it Bubba?”
“No. Shirley, from just outside the Lincoln Tunnel.”
“Is everybody all right?” Blaine’s voice rose above the shrieks and panicked cries that seemed to be coming from everywhere around him.
Johnny and Liz both grunted their assents from the back seat of the car.
“Just barely, boss,” Sal Belamo answered from behind the wheel.